Is there a way to make a project directory for all the external files, including textures and render saves?
I know what you mean and not quite. While Maya has these files on disk, blend files are like an archive and have an internal folder-like structure where it organizes scene data/resources etc. Blender has a feature to pack external resources into your file such as textures/images (useful for appending/linking things later and creating reusable libraries).



I would argue that this is superior to how Maya or Max does it as you can simply pack a blend file and it will locate all external resources and group them into a single file. At anytime, you can always unpack the files to the current directory (usually just creates a textures folder).

Anyway, to answer your question, no it's not possible out of the box to automatically generate folders and have resources or renders to these predefined locations, if you want to mimic such behaviour, you can always create the folders and ensure that your file paths are relative.